Message to Members

From Oct 2008 to Jan 2013, the Planning Jungle website has aimed to find all “LDC Appeals” on the Planning Portal website that are relevant to Part 1 of the GPDO. As of the start of Jan 2013, 373 appeal decisions had been summarised within the “Part 1 of the GPDO - Appeal Decision Summaries” document and 84 appeal decisions had been detailed within the “Part 1 of the GPDO - Incidental Appeal Decisions” document.

From Jan 2013 onwards, the Planning Jungle website will now also aim to find all “Enforcement Appeals” on the Planning Portal website that are relevant to Part 1 of the GPDO. New enforcement appeals (i.e. those dated from Jan 2013 onwards) will now normally be added to the “Part 1 of the GPDO - Appeal Decision Summaries” document within a week of the date they are published, whilst old enforcement appeals (i.e. those dated from Oct 2008 to Dec 2012) will be added to the document in various batches over the course of the year.

It’s important to note that most enforcement appeals are not suitable for inclusion within the “Part 1 of the GPDO - Appeal Decision Summaries” document, even though they might refer to “permitted development” in their “ground (c)” section. In many cases, the reference to PD is too trivial – for example, the decision notice might simply state that “the rear extension is 5m deep and therefore not PD”. In other cases, the reference to PD relates to the previous version of Part 1 of the GPDO, because the works were started prior to Oct 2008. In other cases, it’s not possible to reach any conclusions because there’s not enough information - for example, if the decision notice states “the dormer is contrary to B.2(b)” but the Inspector doesn’t fully describe the situation and the drawings aren’t available on the local authority’s website, then it’s unlikely to be possible to reach any conclusions.

The reason why it’s likely to take a number of months for the old enforcement appeals to be added to the “Part 1 of the GPDO - Appeal Decision Summaries” document is because they’re much harder to find than the LDC appeals. At this stage, it’s estimated that this project will involve searching through approximately 10,000 enforcement appeals (i.e. those dated from Oct 2008 to Dec 2012) and that this will find approx 100 enforcement appeals (i.e. approx 1%) that are suitable for inclusion within the “Part 1 of the GPDO - Appeal Decision Summaries” document.

Finally, in the “Part 1 of the GPDO - Appeal Decision Summaries” document, the LDC appeals will continue to be allocated codes such as “January 2013 - Code a00374”, whereas the enforcement appeals will be allocated codes such as “January 2013 - Code e2013-001” (i.e. the former contains an “a” whereas the latter contains an “e”). It’s possible that after all of the old enforcement appeals have been added to the document their codes will be updated.